It’s nearly impossible nowadays not to be well acquainted with the attention span issues and ‘brain rot’ of the current media landscape. And while we are quick to acknowledge that this is our new and pitiful reality, we not only perpetuate it and make it part of our lives, but also criticize anything that challenges it.
With the rise of short-form content we have also seen a rise in dopamine addiction — through things like Instagram Reels and TikToks — and problems with people’s attention spans. We are now more aware of this than ever. Yet, it seems at times that we are just as willing to stand by this reality rather than to try to fight for our creativity and concentration back.
Attention is not just needed to focus on things; attention is what allows someone to build a skill set, improve their knowledge and to analyze the world around them. Attention is at the root of any sort of intellect. Even in Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, he notes how some cultures produce children that are better at math than others because those cultures produce children who are more willing to sit still and persevere through complicated and laborious tasks. Gladwell explains that concentration as a whole has a huge impact on our abilities to be good at something. Though this specific argument in his book focuses on how being from different cultures impacts your perseverance when working on certain tasks, the underlying claim is the same: focus is a key determining factor in someone’s success. That is one of the things this generation is slowly losing. Many people cannot sit down to read a book or watch a movie without a phone next to them tooffer extra boosts of dopamine.
So why then, when we encounter things that are hard for us to understand, and knowing we are being forced into an attention scarce world, do we decide that anything that requires our attention and longer analysis is ‘pretentious’ and ‘not worth our time’? People make fun of others for reading classical literature, criticize it as being ‘inaccessible’ and instead read abridged self help books that teach the same lessons as quality fiction.
The other issue is how normalized it has become that content is becoming more simplified. Studios have started telling screen writers to produce an output that is designed with the idea of “second screening” (the act of using your phone while watching a movie) in mind. They dumb down plots in order for people to be able to follow along more easily. Some movies, which have more complex plot lines, twists and metafictionality are considered too complex and pretentious because they are not meant to be digested easily. People have come to a point where, when presented with art that they need to analyze, they do not want to engage because they are not being presented with overt messaging. Creators have reacted to this new audience engagement with media and have responded with creating work that isn’t just unpretentious, this work simply cannot be considered creative.
The “pretentious” problem, as I label it, is that instead of fighting to keep our attention, to learn new things and to become better at analysis, we are spiraling into thinking whatever we cannot understand is pretentious and therefore we should just ignore it. We have adapted to a world hell-bent on making us incapable of any form of critical thinking, and we have decided that the one way out (working on our focus and analytical skills) is pretentious.
Why should we have to think about art? Why should movies have a message that you won’t notice if you’re scrolling while watching? Why should we read classic novels if we can read self help books that condense the messages of several 800-page novels into a few short pages? We all have attention issues because of our technology-filled world, but how we choose to address those attention issues is changing not just who we are as people but also how art is created around us.
Lusine Boyadzhyan is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at lboyadzhyan@cornellsun.com.
